Bodies at the Crossroads Between Immigration and Health

Abstract

There is a growing concern for the intensification of health problems among immigrants who have recently arrived in European countries in relation to the deleterious impacts of the poor living conditions in which they find themselves and the constraints on accessing healthcare services. Taking a biopolitical approach in which immigrants’ bodies are not passive vectors and receptors of illness, we question why the immigrant body figures in our social worlds as the sign of a difference. In order to redraw immigrant pathways of healthcare and healing in the light of their daily contexts and realities, we privilege a multidisciplinary approach, connecting social geography with humanities disciplines and mixing different research materials arising from ethnographic research work and photography. We first illustrate how immigrant women re-appropriate their own bodies and analyse their place in the world as socially constructed objects within a social space in which carers, social workers, women themselves and their relatives and families are shaped and emerge together. We then expand our reflections on the subject of immigration as social geographers by adding a new path through photography to our “conventional” qualitative methodological tools in order to explore emotions and body concerns. By going beyond the argumentative role of research in the human sciences, and by going beyond scientific postures seeking to “speak for”, we have tried to bring something other than scientific proof or critical testimony about pregnancy and maternity in migration.